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AR Tamagotchi, Pottery Barn, eBay and More Announced at GDC

Google also released their own “Just A Line” creative AR illustration app.

Last month, Google launched ARCore 1.0, making AR development faster and easier for even more mobile devices. At the time, we got a preview of a handful of apps that developers were already building with Google’s augmented reality platform, including apps from Porsche, Sotheby’s, and even a Ghostbusters experience that has you firing a particle beam to vacuum up Slimer.

Now Google is sharing even more apps that developers have been creating. Announced at GDC, Google highlighted just a few of the 60+ apps from early partners that are going live on Google Play soon.

While all early explorations across gaming, shopping, and creativity, these highlighted apps should have a few of you excited to download and really show the potential of what’s possible in the future from AR.

Here are a some of the first AR games built with ARCore released at GDC:

My Tamagotchi Forever

Seizing on our nostalgia for all things 90s, Tamagotchi is back! The original digital pet for many of us old enough to remember, Bandai Namco is throwing out that tiny plastic egg for an ARCore app. The AR-enabled game will have you raising Tamagotchi characters while building and populating Tamatown; a virtual town you can also play with in the real world.

Expect a less needy pet over the original, but there’s still no way to get out of all that damn feeding, washing, and picking up poo. Yep, poo days are back.

TendAR

Tender Claws created TendAR, a game that features Guppy, a virtual fish that responds to users’ facial expressions, and survives by “eating” other people’s emotions. The game was created by combining ARCore with the Google Cloud API, which provides computer vision and object recognition. TendAR will be available for download starting in July 2018.

Walking Dead Our World

The Walking Dead is getting a location-based AR mobile game of its own. The game features location as a core element of gameplay, closely following the Pokémon GO model for location-based AR mobile apps. Your goal is to defend your surroundings by fighting walkers in real-life environments. Using the Google Maps API and ARCore together, this one should get you out of the house again. The game is currently in pre-registration here and the release is planned for Q2 2018.

Pottery Barn 360° Room View

With Pottery Barn’s AR app you can both view furniture in your room to see how it pairs with your existing pieces or empty the room to start the design process from scratch. Using the app, you can change the color and fabric on Pottery Barn’s furniture before deciding which looks best and can purchase what you’ve selected directly from the app.

eBay

Yep, eBay has an AR app. But it’s probably not what you were thinking. eBay is using AR to solve a specific challenge facing their community of sellers: what size shipping container is needed to send that product? With eBay’s “Which Box” feature, sellers can visualize shipping boxes to determine which container size they need to send any product. It sounds like a small thing, but it actually makes a huge difference for the efficiency and workflow of sellers.

Just A Line

Probably my favorite app out of the bunch, Google is inviting all of us to experiment in AR with a new creativity app. The app lets you make simple drawings in AR, then share your creation with a short video. The caveat: it’s “Just a Line.”

Who knew that just making simple drawings in AR could be so beautiful and fun. Google is also open-sourcing the core code of the app so developers can easily use it as a starting point for their own ARCore projects.

Google worked with artist Shantell Martin to see what she’d make with the app—it’s worth a watch.

Just a Line works on any phone that supports ARCore, and to try it, you can download it here.

Have you come across any other ARCore apps we should be highlighting? Let us know.

Image Credit: Google

About the Scout

Jonathan Nafarrete

Jonathan Nafarrete is the co-founder of VRScout.

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